Bio

Dr Stephane Hess is Professor of Choice Modelling at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the Research Group Leader for Economics and Discrete Choice. He is also Honorary Professor in the Institute for Transport and Logistics Studies at the University of Sydney, an external affiliate in the Centre for the Study of Choice (CenSoC) at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a senior technical advisor for Resource Systems Group. He has formerly held posts as a research fellow in the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College London and as a senior researcher in the Institute for Traffic Planning and Transport Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH). He has also spent time as a visiting researcher in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hess holds a PhD in transport demand modelling from Imperial College London, and a MPhil in Statistical Science from Cambridge University. His main research interests lie in the use of advanced discrete choice models for the analysis of travel behaviour, primarily with the use of stated preference data. Here, Hess has made contributions to the state of the art in the specification, estimation and interpretation of such models, notably in a valuation of travel time savings context, while also publishing numerous papers on the benefits of advanced structures in actual large-scale transport analyses, for example in the context of air travel behaviour research. His contributions have been recognised by the 2010 Fred Burggraf award handed out by the Transportation Research Board, the 2005 Eric Pas award for the best PhD thesis in the area of travel behaviour modelling, and the 2004 Neil Mansfield award handed out by the Association for European Transport.

He is also the founding editor in chief of the Journal of Choice Modelling and the organiser of the International Choice Modelling Conference. He serves on the editorial advisory board of two leading journals; Transportation Research B and of Transportation, is the chair of the Innovative Methods in Transport Analysis, Planning and Appraisal committee at the European Transport Conference and a member of two academic committees of the Transportation Research Board. He is a also a member of the council of the Association for European Transport.

Research Grants

Since large monetary investments are involved in infrastructure decisions, it is of utmost importance that impacts of transport policies can be accurately predicted. The recent failures to forecast usage and revenues of toll tunnels in Australia illustrate this well. This project aims to contribute by producing improved practical behavioural models to predict responses to such transport policies to assist in better decision making. Further, the project is expected to make several methodological contributions by for the first time merging methods from stated choice surveys, experimental economics, and naturalistic driving simulators in order to better investigate travel choice behaviour in realistic environments.